MECHANICAL AND USEFUL ARTS. 47 



table, open to the inspection of all the persons present. If there 

 /was a secret once, there is no such thing in this case now. On one 

 evening Sir William Armstrong explained the mode of manufacture, 

 the make, the method of working, loading, sighting, and firing, in 

 the simplest and clearest possible language. Few men possess the 

 enviable gifts of Sir William Armstrong. With a gentlemanly pre- 

 sence, a musical voice, a fluent delivery, a powerful and cultivated 

 intellect, Sir William Armstrong is a man any nation ought to be 

 proud of ; and Lord Derby will have the honour conferred on Sir 

 William long reflected back on himself and on his Government. 

 But to the rifled cannon subject. The gun invented by Sir William 

 Armstrong is in appearance light and even elegant : in use it is in- 

 destructible, and iu its effects tremendous. A dozen such guns at 

 Sebastopol would have shortened that terrible contest, as every ship 

 and steamer afloat in the harbour must have been sunk within the 

 first week of opening fire, and the most distant buildings would 

 have been rendered untenable. All this, and more, was explained 

 during this interesting lecture. Sir William Armstrong explained 

 how his gun was made, the reasons why it was so made, showed its 

 several parts, manipulated the breech, explained the mode of load- 

 ing, the several sorts of solid shot, hollow shot (shell), their mode of 

 bursting, and their effects. 



The Armstrong shot is coated with lead, to allow of its passing 

 the rifle grooves ; and this is, we think, the objectionable feature in 

 this otherwise most admirable cannon. A solid iron shot cannot be 

 turned, or rather, returned, to any offensive use, unless it happen to 

 fit the bore of any hostile cannon most exactly. Hundreds of tons 

 of round shot, and fragments of shell, lay about in front of Sebas- 

 topol, and on the plains of Inkermann and Balaclava, perfectly un- 

 useable ; but if these had been fired from Sir William Armstrong's 

 rifled cannon, the lead would all have been useable for rifle bullets ; 

 and, if ever fired against semi-savage nations, the lead from Sir 

 William's shot will most certainly be so returned to us. The 

 leaden jacket, or coating, is necessary to Sir William's plan of 

 rifling, and in this necessity the weakness of his invention lies. 



On the Tuesday night following Sir William Armstrong's exposi- 

 tion, Mr. Whitworth had a full meeting, and one of his wonderful 

 12-pounder field-guns was on the table before him. 



Sir William Armstrong makes his guns of flat bars and flat rings 

 of wrought iron twisted and welded together. Whitworth makes his 

 guns out of homogeneous iron or steel, — that is, iron run from cruci- 

 bles into moulds, so as to form one solid, compact, homogeneous 

 mass. Both guns are breech loaders, both have a direct passage 

 through, from breech to muzzle, and both breeches open and close 

 by means of levers and screws. In the Armstrong gun, the breech 

 piece is small and movable, and there may be any number ready to 

 replace a lost or damaged one. In the Whitworth gun, the breech 

 piece is heavy, and opens clumsily on a hinge, so as to be sadly in 

 the way during loading, and liable to accident. Injury to the 

 breech would be for the time ruination to the gun. This hinged 



